I’ve actually been meaning to blog about this for awhile, but have been putting it off, so here goes.

I’ve mentioned in the past my analogy of “flying the plan”. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on a site called Quora. It’s quite a fun site and I’ve learned quite a bit.

But this particular question I think is a great one for life in general.

Scrolling down, you’ll see a post from Jim Mantle. I want to take a quote from his answer:

There have been many air crashes where a problem was being worked by both pilots, neither was flying the aircraft, and they had a Very Bad Day.

If you read about the L1011 Crash you’ll see the real mistake was failing to actually fly the plane. The crew was so engrossed in solving the problem of a burnt-out landing gear light that they missed the fact that the plane was flying into the ground.  A simple burned out bulb and 101 people died.

Compare that to the Miracle on the Hudson where the pilots had a MUCH worse problem (lack of power in either engine) and managed to bring the plane down safely without any loss of life.

He also has good advice that he repeats often “Keep calm”.

I also want to quote Dirk Van Der Walk who later says:

You can run out of height, you can run out of engine, but one thing you can never run out of, is a plan. You must always have a Plan B.

I had a client a few years ago that had called me in to implement a specific change in their infrastructure.  There was also a fairly specific timetable by which it had to be done.

I met with CTO about once a month to go over the status of the project.  At one point it became clear that due to certain corporate policies, it would take about 12 weeks to get to a certain milestone in the project.  Unfortunately the schedule demanded we be there in about 8 weeks.

He asked me what we could do.  I explained I had no control over the corporate policies and that we should start to consider a Plan B.  I’m quite proud that I kept my jaw from hitting the floor when he uttered his next sentence.

This is no plan B and there can’t be a plan B.

This is an example of taking the mantra “Failure is not an option” to a whole new level.

Ironically I was there about a month later when the CTO was basically called out on the carpet for the status of the project and when it was clear he had no plan B, the corporate folks spent the next 24 hours designing a plan B.

In part this wasn’t too hard because the internal people on the project had already had several plan B’s in their mind.

It was only because others did have a plan B that we were able to save any real semblance of the original goal.

Moral of the story: always have a backup plan.  And start thinking about a backup plan to the backup plan.